Distractions and an Upcoming Absence

There’s something to be said for solitude. Especially in the modern age, where digital distractions and the concept of being forever “connected” to work, to friends, to society at large in general, is more the rule than the exception. Don’t get me wrong: connectedness can be nice. The internet at large has enabled me to stay in touch with folks from whom I would have likely drifted were it not there, and it’s enabled me to connect with others whom I’d never have met in any other way.

But the fact remains that such always-on connectedness can be a millstone when the chips are down and the work at hand requires single-minded focus. This is something the past few months have taught me in the most visceral way.

When you discover that a revision is actually a rewrite, and when all your demons well up to “assist” in the process, it’s easy to succumb to the temptation to just ignore your work for a while. When that troublesome line—or paragraph—or chapter—is staring you in the face, refusing to relinquish its secrets despite all manner of threats, it’s easy to just go check your email for the twentieth time or to kill an hour or two on Facebook. You know—for the sake of networking or something.

So the problem is that all these “mini-breaks” have become a hindrance rather than a helpmeet.

Some folks a very good at ignoring distractions, setting them aside, buckling down, and Getting Shit Done. But for all my workaholic tendencies, I’m not one of those people. I never was in school—if it was hard or boring, I immediately lost interest in favor of what was fun or easy—and I’m still not as an adult. That’s unlikely to change at my age, I think.

But what I am, thank the various gods, is aware of this fact. That awareness wells up from time to time, driving me to isolate myself from contact with other people. If I’d been writing some decades ago, this would have been as simple as just stocking the larder, unplugging the telephone, and locking the front door. Just me and my beer and the agonizing potential of the empty page.

But even if I were to do the equivalent of that these days, there’s the ever-present temptation to just click over to the browser and avoid the work at hand.

As a result, early this week, a concept struck me that was so astoundingly simple as to have been easily missed. In my junk I have an old laptop, a ten-pound bruiser of a beast I took with me to college just under 15 years ago. Even after all these years and many adventures, it still works (though it seems to think it’s January of 1980—a clock battery problem). It also still retains a serviceable install of Word 2000, but technology is such now that although it theoretically could get online, my usual distractions there would never load, much less run comfortably.

So it struck me that working on Oath of Blood on The Beast was an incredibly solid idea. It took some wrestling to get things up and running—stripping The Beast of everything but what it needed to support Word, converting files to RTF so the old software could read them, transferring said files using a 3.5” floppy (I am a packrat; I still have some) because The Beast doesn’t support USB storage devices—but the thing was done. I immediately saw results. The simple removal of the temptation to dip over into my distractions was enough to force focus.

Still, the subtler distractions of the house made themselves evident in the absence of electronic diversions: the many books I want to read, the antics of the cats, the fact that my husband was in the next room and generally open to idle conversation. The latter, I think, is the hardest one.

Being married, as you might guess, is its own challenge, and even after nearly 5 years of it I’m still adjusting. I don’t in any way grudge my husband’s presence, but we’re both fairly intense people with intense interests. We also both have what are, at very best, irregular schedules. This leads to an environment where it’s tough to tack down a sustained work period where one is truly alone—something I could always rely on when I was single.

Though I haven’t asked him directly, I suspect it’s equally true for him. After all, I imagine it’s less than helpful to him when I go growling up and down the hall trying to unknot a problem while he pores over schematics that look, to my eyes, like lost leaves from the Necronomicon.

Under normal circumstances, I could work around this. However, I’ve reached the point with Oathwhere I need to eliminate even the most benign distractions or risk never finishing the thing. As a result, this weekend I began to cast about for isolation-friendly alternatives to the house, but running off to some temporary escape for a few days, be it a Walden-esque cabin in the woods or even just the local Motel 6, is a prohibitively expensive proposition.

Here providence of a sort seems to have intervened. I have a relative who is planning to depart tomorrow for a week-long vacation, and the offer was made to me that, if I needed an isolated place to set up camp, said relative’s house was available, as was the food in the refrigerator. The one catch was that I must bring my own beer and smoke outside—all in all not a bad trade.

As you might expect, I said yes. My husband, on whom falls the upkeep of the cats and the running of errands in my absence, was also amenable, so provided everything pans out, I’ll be headed that way tomorrow with my duffel bag and The Beast for a week of house-sitting. That means, of course, that I won’t be online in any capacity and won’t be available by phone except for absolute emergencies.

If that seems a bit extreme, well, it is. But it’s also something I’m able to do thanks to the generosity of others and a bit of cosmic serendipity. I doubt I’ll finish my rewrite of Oath completely in that time, but the isolated focus promises the opportunity to make the lion’s share of the progress that remains. Naturally, what I do with the time is up to me, but the fact that I have a means to dig in and seclude myself is a hopeful thing.

So here’s to productivity! See you all on the flipside, hopefully with a good bit of progress to report!